Related Stories

A Brockville woman who has lived in Canada for 62 years claims she is stranded in Holland because the Canadian government won’t give her a visa to return home.

Riemke Bles, who came to Canada with her parents in 1955 at the age of one and a half, says she is caught in a diplomatic Catch-22 in which the airline won’t honour her return ticket to Canada without a visa, but the embassy won’t give her a visa because she lives in Canada.

Her situation is made more dramatic by the fact she is trying to return quickly to attend to her husband, who has taken a bad fall at St. Lawrence Lodge in Brockville, she said.

Despite living more than six decades in Canada, Bles has never become a Canadian citizen and she travels on her Dutch passport. (She said she tried to become a citizen several years ago but failed the written test.)

Bles said she left on vacation for the Netherlands on Sept. 11 with a return ticket for a month later on Oct. 11.

But last week Bles said she received a call from St. Lawrence Lodge telling her that her husband of 37 years, Jack Brown, a Canadian, had fallen and that “he was in a bad way.”

Bles said she went to the airport to change her ticket to fly back on Thursday. KLM Airlines gave her a new ticket but told her she needed a visa to re-enter Canada.

Go to the Canadian embassy in The Hague, she was told, Bles said.

But at the embassy, Bles said, the guards outside wouldn’t let her in – “he wouldn’t even let me inside the gates” – advising her to apply for a visa online.

Since Thursday, Bles said she has been calling the embassy, sending emails and writing politicians, to no avail.

Her attempts to apply for a visa online come back “denied” when she lists her Brockville address, she said.

“Everybody sends me all over the place for the visa, but I don’t need a visa, I live in Canada,” she said. “I’m stuck here. It’s absurd.”

Bles said she has visited Holland several times in the past and never had any trouble returning to Canada. She is now staying with friends in Belgium while she attempts to work through the bureaucracy. Her frustration is clearly growing.

“I said I was going to strap myself to the gates of the Canadian Embassy, naked, smoking weed,” she said in a telephone interview from Belgium. “Maybe then somebody would come out to talk to me.”

Bles said her money is running low and her cellphone bill is climbing as she tries to get somebody to pay attention.

“If I was a refugee I’d get a new car, a house and $30,000 a year.”

Bles has lived in Brockville for a year since moving from Merrickville where she ran her own business, the Cafe de Winkel, for about 20 years. Her husband Jack Brown ran a service station in the area until he developed Alzheimer’s disease.

'“My husband is Canadian, my children are Canadian, my brothers are Canadian, my neighbours are Canadian …” she said.

Contacted for comment, the Department of Foreign Affairs referred The Recorder and Times to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada because Bles is not a Canadian citizen.

A spokesman for the immigration department said the department could not comment on Bles’s case unless Bles gave her written consent. That consent could not be obtained by press time.